POST: Evaluating Digital Humanities Beyond the Tenure Track Parts 1 and 2

Beth Seltzer (Bryn Mawr College) has authored two posts on evaluating work in the digital humanities, as part of a series of MLA Committee on Information Technology blog posts. Part 1, “For Employees” and part 2, “For Employers,” focus on ways to evaluate the work of “alt-ac” and “other digital humanities professionals not working in traditional tenure-track roles” from the points of view of workers and employers.

Seltzer notes in the two posts’ introduction that she is particularly interested in exploring the “less-charted” career paths of DH professionals:

To a great extent, evaluating the work of these positions is the same as evaluating the work of anyone else–good scholarship is good scholarship, from any source. But the less-charted paths of Digital Scholarship Specialists and Digital Humanities Librarians can lead to some specific issues and points of tension, which I want to address here. I think there’s a lot more discussion to be had on these issues as we work towards fuller guidelines, and I’m hoping this will be only the first part of the conversation. Please reach out to me (or to the CIT) with additional ideas!

dh+lib readers will be particularly interested in the breakdowns of “Some Types of Digital Humanities Professionals” in part 1, and of issues of hiring and promotion in parts 1 and 2.